It seemed such a good idea at the time: devote the first week of July purely to the fresh Senate, allowing the rookie crossbenchers to assert their brand new power over Labor and the Greens by happily and compliantly sweeping away the carbon tax and the mining tax before they quite knew what they were doing.

The House of Representatives wouldn't sit: all the lovely limelight would belong to the Senate, whose occupants are regularly ignored and who would thus, surely, be suffused with gratitude.

Happiness all round for the Abbott government, laurels for its senators and air-kisses aplenty for the blushing new inhabitants of the place.

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Caligula, they would recall, made something of a mistake by treating the Roman Senate with disdain. He rode his horse into the Senate and proposed that the pampered beast be made a senator. Caligula lasted no more than two years before he was put to the sword.

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All these years later in Canberra, some of the new senators - or those who whisper in their ears in the privacy of their comfortable new suites - turn out to have minds of their own. Ricky Muir, the Motoring Enthusiast from the forests of Gippsland, shocked everyone on Wednesday when he decided he wouldn't allow the government to chop short debate on the carbon tax, which would have allowed a nice tidy and quick vote.

While his putative colleagues in the Palmer United Party charged across the chamber to support the Coalition, as planned, Muir wasn't for moving. He - plus the micro-alliance of independent Nick Xenophon and the Democratic Labour Party's John Madigan - voted with Labor and the Greens.

If this alarming outbreak of independence wasn't enough - was the Palmer-Motoring Enthusiast alliance already shot? - Muir was bent on causing dyspepsia to the architects of the Abbott budget.

Declaring himself a long-time supporter of renewable energy, he rejoined the Palmer alliance to save the $2.5 billion Australian Renewable Energy Agency, which the government had anticipated sending to the slaughter yard.

Who would have known that the motoring enthusiast who enjoys roaring through the forests in big four-wheel-drives (and Clive Palmer, for that matter, a mining billionaire who owns a hundred or so gas guzzlers and a private jet) believed so passionately in renewable energy?

The government and its budget was in for a further shredding when the Liberal Democratic Party's David Leyonhjelm climbed to his feet and deftly ripped another $2 billion from savings proposed in the budget.

Senator Leyonhjelm, a classic libertarian who believes government should get out of people's private lives and that taxes should be much reduced, joined Family First senator Bob Day, a social conservative who believes government should regulate private behaviour at its most intimate levels, joined hands to prevent the government from cutting income tax breaks that were to disappear with the carbon tax.

To the Abbott government strategists, it must surely have seemed the inmates had taken possession of the asylum … or that Caligula's horse had gone berserk and kicked them in their most sensitive area, the budget.